P2P at Akamai: Ready for a comeback?

"Sources that work in the P2P delivery space say that Akamai has been pitching a client-based distribution technology to some of its customers over the past few months, most notably to gaming and media companies that offer large file downloads. Those same sources expect that Akamai could soon make the offering public."

Of course, Akamai previously acquired Red Swoosh, and it has since rebranded the Red Swoosh client as the Akamai Netsession Interface. Seeking Alpha is also reporting two recent hirings that were news to me: Both Haiyoung Xie and Bill Wishon now work for the CDN operator. Xie came up with the idea for P4P while at Yale, and Wishon used to work for Kontiki.

It's going to be interesting to see how exactly Akamai is going to roll out this product. However, I doubt they're ever going to be as radical as the original Red Swhoosh guys who wanted to transform P2P into the CDN of choice for bloggers, podcasters and social media users.

Comments

Hello,
a VERY interesting idea. And I am sure that this will be the future of social media. One thing is clear, p2p will succed. Centralized server structure will become too expensive and too complicated to maintain.
But please have a look at my side where I am dreaming about my idea of a p2p business layer.
Juergen